Why Osbert Lancaster is our favourite writer on interiors

Salubrious dwellings for the industrious artisan

"While the Victorian architects were busy erecting tasteful
reproductions of Chartres cathedral and the belfry of Bruges (so
useful for factory chimneys) and covering the rather inefficiently
drained marshes on the outskirts of Westminster with the stucco
palaces of the nobility and gentry, it must not be imagined that
the needs of the humbler classes of the community were in any way
overlooked. In all the great new towns of the Midlands and the
Industrial North large housing estates sprang up on which, by the
exercise of remarkable forethought and ingenuity, so great was the
anxiety lest the worker should be too far removed from the sights
and sounds of the factory or mine which was the scene of his
cheerful labour, a quite fantastic number of working families were
accommodated."